Since it went up about 24 hours ago, the new server has been working very well and I’ve been very happy with the results. We should hopefully now be able to avoid the downtime and poor loading that plagued the previous two weeks, at least for a long time to come. I really want to thank Mentar for helping us get the server and Maestro for spending so much of his valuable time helping set everything up. It’s because of Maestro that everything got transferred over relatively smoothly, so I’m really grateful. I also want to thank my friend Patrik for providing a spot to host images temporarily while we were going through that period. For those of you curious, Mentar was the one who suggested and helped us get a dedicated server out of Germany that was significantly cheaper than the American solutions we were looking at earlier. It should be more than enough to allow this site to grow several times over.

That brings me to the second point of this entry. Instead of the $150 dollars I originally cited, the new server will cost 49 euros (~$63.28) a month. I’m delighted that it’s less expensive than I thought it’d be, but that’s still a hefty amount per month. Taking into considerations all the comments that everyone left when I talked about costs last time, the most reliable course of action was to add ads to the site. While I would have preferred to avoid them, the reality is that not everyone who wants to help out necessarily has the ability to send in a donation. I know this won’t make everyone happy – that includes myself – but I hope those of you who hate ads can try to overlook them. For those of you who love the site and still want to make a donation, I am indeed still holding a donation drive to help cover the costs since I’m not entirely sure how well the ads will do and since every little bit helps. I agree with all the people who said that asking for donations every month is a bad thing, so the goal of this drive will be to cover six months worth of costs. That’s a fairly lofty goal that I’m not sure we’ll meet, but that’s why we have the ads for support too. If you would like to make a donation, please visit AnimeBlogger’s Donation page .

I’d like to once again thank everyone who visits the site. It’s because of you, the reader, that this site has been able to grow so much. There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming months, especially in the spring and fall seasons, so I hope that you’ll stay tuned.

The server move is now complete, although the DNS changes are still propagating out so some people will get sent to the old server. Those that do will see an error message about bad_httpd_conf. That’s normal, the old server isn’t setup to serve Random Curiosity any longer. (This was unavoidable.)

I apologize for the move taking longer than we expected. We ran into problems with the DNS change, namely the old provider’s system glitched and wouldn’t remove the old DNS entries for several hours. (I had to submit a support ticket to finally get the old entries cleared out.) At one point both IP addresses (old and new servers) were being returned so you had about a 50% chance of getting the correct one. Now the authoritative DNS servers are all returning only the new server IP, but it will take a while for all of the DNS servers on the Internet to sync up. As I mentioned earlier the rule of thumb on this is up to 48 hours for changes to fully propagate. Most people will probably see the change sooner (much sooner), but some may take the full 48 hours.

Comments have been turned back on so feel free to comment again. If you see any strangeness or something not working properly please let us know! We’ve tested the new setup and everything looks to be working but it’s always possible we missed something. :)